Lucretia Mott

Best known as: The Quaker minister who was the first to sign the Seneca Falls women's rights declaration

Name at birth: Lucretia Coffin

Lucretia Mott was a Quaker minister who was active in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States. She was born to the prominent Coffin family on the whaling island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. In her teens she attended a Quaker school in New York where she met her future husband, James Mott. They married in 1811 and moved to Philadelphia, and it was there that she became first a prominent speaker in her church and then (in 1821) a Quaker minister. Her husband was a successful trader, and this allowed Lucretia Mott to travel and speak more widely in the eastern and new midwestern United States. In 1848 she helped to organize the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and was the first to sign the famous Declaration of Sentiments which resulted. After the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, Lucretia Mott remained a key figure in the women's suffrage movement until her death at age 87 in 1880.

Extra credit:

Lucretia Mott had six children with James Mott between 1812 and 1828… Both Lucretia and James Mott were among the Quakers who founded Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1864.